Blog
Project Blog
Here we will be blogging to record our experiences of the project.
E. Bailey, 'Finding Early Medieval Women: A University of Sheffield Placement with the ‘Women, Conflict and Peace: Gendered Networks in Early Medieval Narratives (c.330-735)’ project.'
18th May 2021
Over the past few weeks, I have had the pleasure of working on the ‘Women, Conflict and Peace: Gendered Networks in Early Medieval Narratives (c.330-735)’ project with Prof. Julia Hillner and Dr. Máirín MacCarron. This internship has been part of a University of Sheffield Work Placement module, and my experience on the project has been incredibly flexible and shaped by consistent virtual meetings.
The project seeks to find and analyse medieval women in their networks in contexts of both peace-building and conflict, and combines qualitative reading with quantitative network analysis to understand what authors and audiences thought of women’s roles in society. The team includes historians, physicists, and computer scientists, and the project’s incredible output, collated on the ‘Publications’ page of the project website, is testimony to the value of these interdisciplinary collaborations.
Approaching the project as an outsider, the methods of data collection and analysis of narratives are at first quite a daunting sight. The Excel spreadsheets are large repositories of data recording characters, their connections between each other, and of course their gender. The sheets use a data model which categorises relationships between characters based on the nature of their interactions, such as kinship, marriage, religious familia, patronage, political and religious hostility, letter recipients, and more—totaling twenty-one different types of connection. These relationships are organised horizontally and can be traced alongside a vertical list of characters, ordered by book and chapter, to examine the position of different characters to each other and within the narrative. With the help of Rob Heffron, I was able to navigate the spreadsheets of finished texts, and apply this understanding to the ‘proof-reading’ of a narrative undergoing data collection: Athanasius’ 'Historia Arianorum'.
This was an excellent way to introduce myself to the project’s methods, as the spreadsheet had already been created and I could simply read the text and make changes and graft modifications on as I thought necessary. It also meant that within the time frame of the internship I was able to see the second part of the project’s network analysis—the creation of graphs with coding that visualises the Excel data mined from narratives.
Figure 1: Network of characters in Athanasius’ ‘Historia Arianorum’.
By using different coloured and shaped nodes to show characters’ gender and whether named or unnamed, and one-way or mutual ‘edges’ between characters to show connections, great webs of networks are created showing quite literally how individuals and groups accessed and understood each other. Character nodes and the connections between them appear like atoms, sprawling yet ordered, and it was thrilling to pore over the graphs created from 'Historia Arianorum' and recognise the characters with whom I had become so familiar with during my reading, and see clearly the roles played by the women in the narrative.
With this experience I created from scratch another database on another of Athanasius’ narratives: 'The Life of St. Antony'. Despite being a reclusive, ascetic monk, Antony appears remarkably ‘well-connected’ in the dataset with plenty of visitors, especially fellow monks, and a trip to Alexandria. He also has plenty of supernatural experiences with demons, and many of his connections appear as miraculous patronage. This database was finished recently, and between both datasets on Athanasius’ writings I have gotten a firm grounding in the production and results from the data model for the project. Any text that may seem unwieldly on first read becomes easily quantifiable and powerfully visualised through the spreadsheets and network graphs, and this data has been clearly represented online.
Much of my internship revolved around the website for the project, rearranging information to be as easily accessible and citable as possible, and adding new pages that allowed for a more thorough understanding of the project’s output. I have made a new page displaying the data for ‘Top 10 Women’, which orders the women in various texts (compared with men) by the amount of connections they have and the centrality of their place in the network. I have also made a page explaining the process of the ‘Data Model’ and the pre-existing ‘Data’ page has been divided into manageable sections by provenance: Later Roman Empire, Merovingian Gaul, and Northumbria. To visitors of the website, even with a fairly limited understanding of the texts analysed the organised pages of datasets and graphs allow for thorough engagement with the project.
This website is the public face of the project, and is even more widely disseminated through Twitter posts. It reveals the project’s transparency and ability to make complicated datasets and network graphs accessible for those working on the representation of women. It is a testament to the growing digital side of history and the importance of public accessibility in academia, and the project as a whole has been an eye-opening internship opportunity on the ‘behind the scenes’ of academic projects. After all, I have learnt perhaps as much about the networks that make scholarship possible as I have about medieval gendered networks themselves.
Eleanor Bailey.